Posted by gfiorelli1 Sometimes I think that us SEOs could be wonderful characters for a Woody Allen movie: We are stressed, nervous, paranoid, we have a tendency for sudden changes of mood…okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but that’s how we tend to (over)react whenever Google announces something. Cases like this webmaster, who is desperately thinking he was penalized by Hummingbird, are not uncommon. One thing that doesn’t help is the lack of clarity coming from Google, which not only never mentions Hummingbird in any official document (for example, in the post of its 15th anniversary), but has also shied away from details of this epochal update in the “off-the-record” declarations of Amit Singhal. In fact, in some ways those statements partly contributed to the confusion. When Google announces an updateâ€”especially one like Hummingbirdâ€”the best thing to do is to avoid trying to immediately understand what it really is based on intuition alone. It is better to wait until the dust falls to the ground, recover the original documents, examine those related to them (and any variants), take the time to see the update in action, calmly investigate, and then after all that try to find the most plausible answers. This method is not scientific (and therefore the answers can’t be defined as “surely correct”), it is philological, and when it comes to Google and its updates, I consider it a great method to use. The original documents are the story for the press of the event during which Google announced Hummingbird, and the FAQ that Danny Sullivan published immediately after the event, which makes direct reference to what Amit Singhal said